


Speak Easy

by gendzl



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: (but I'm gentle about it I promise), Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Transphobia, Trans Male Character, also Wolfsheim doesn't exist bc he's an antisemitic caricature and I'm a self-respecting Jew, medical ACCURACIES for once., the au where everyone is a better person OR simply by removing Tom I fixed the tragedy, unapologetic abuse of public domain material
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28487019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendzl/pseuds/gendzl
Summary: "Nick Carraway," I said politely."Carraway." There came a brief pause as his eyes raked over my face, inspecting my jawline and cheekbones with a critical air. Comparing. I felt more naked than ever before in my life, a part of me convinced that he would notice something amiss through my flannel suit. Naturally, he only asked, "Any relation to Daisy Fay? I heard mention of that name from her a time or two.""My cousin."Long gone,I didn't add. The lie—practiced in my bathroom mirror until my face stopped betraying me as I spoke—burned its way up my throat. Daisy was my cousin. Daisy was dead. These were the facts as they had been rewritten; this was the story my family had consented to tell.The sting of it lingered behind my nose, unpleasant as alcohol caught in my sinuses."It's a pleasure to meet you," he said."You as well—" I allowed my voice to break off into a nearly awkward silence and he adopted an air of mild surprise at the idea of having to introduce himself."Forgive me, old sport. I'm Jay Gatsby."
Relationships: Nick Carraway/Jay Gatsby
Comments: 44
Kudos: 117





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to my _"The Great Gatsby_ is finally in the public domain!" celebration fic. It's ours now, Fitzy. We can put our gay, trans little hands all over it.
> 
> I had grand plans of posting this as a finished work today, but life happened and six months passed to find me still picking away at a disjointed draft. It's 7k at the moment, with no end in sight. Something to look forward to, I suppose!
> 
> While this fic significantly alters the plot, mixes up the flashbacks, adjusts the timeline, and changes rather a lot just generally, I've treated what's coming with the utmost sincerity. I love this novel with my whole heart. I can only hope my fic does it at least a little bit of queer justice. Thank you for joining me here <3

When it came time to marry Tom Buchanan, they found me in the stuffy back room of the church, hyperventilating and clawing ineffectually at the zipper of my dress. A bridesmaid (Jordan, the only one I'd insisted on having, and therefore the only one who hadn't been assigned to the wedding party by Tom) reached for me in a rare moment of emotional insight and unzipped it—one quick tug wrenching it open to the small of my back—and I collapsed to the floor beside an abandoned altar, sobbing and clutching the gaping fabric to my chest. I remember being struck by the sight of a bottle of communion wine nestled into the shadows of the altar: the only object in the room not covered in a layer of dust. Everything else about that day has since retreated into a gauzy blur.

I am fairly certain that I left the church through a side door; I cannot imagine I would have escaped unmolested out the front. I don't know who spoke to Tom, or what they told him, or the words that were used to disperse the large crowd which had gathered to see us marry. I asked Jordan to tell them all that Daisy had changed her mind, but to this day I haven't bothered asking if she actually did it.

This was the rumored start to my illness, I heard later. I couldn't bring myself to care.

I slipped through the hedges in the last pair of high-heeled shoes I would ever wear, and that night was the second time I ever got drunk; the second time in as many days. I managed it with the bottle of communion wine I'd tucked into the folds of my dress.

* * *

It had come to me over tea one morning, and it came fully formed. I was stirring sugar into my teacup, one eye on the newspaper at my elbow, some corner of my mind concerned with an issue we were having with the wedding caterer, and it dropped in from the sky, taking root as though it had always been there.

_I'm a man._

It was an almost absent realization, the culmination of details collecting unnoticed until something small and unidentifiably innocuous tipped the scales, but it was one that—once realized—became a thought I turned over in my mind at nearly every waking moment, prodding it for weaknesses, insecurities. Faults.

There were none.

And so, four months after what would have been my wedding day, and two years after I brought Jay Gatsby home, I entered a hospital with an overnight bag and six kinds of courage, leaving again a short time later with a flat, tender chest and the name Nick clenched between my teeth like a victory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The events of _Gatsby_ are set during the summer of 1922. Synthetic hormones were first manufactured in 1920, and one of the first documented gender-affirming surgeries performed in the United States was in 1917, a hysterectomy/gonadectomy for Dr. Alan L. Hart. 
> 
> I am not a historian, but I am a trans man with a healthy amount of skepticism regarding transgender history. Cis comfort is prioritized before trans lives, etc etc etc. As such, I'm handling the existence of gender-affirming surgeries in this fic as though they happened regularly in the '20s, if not frequently. I simply find it impossible to believe that **no** surgeons existed who—if not sympathetic towards our difficulties—weren't willing to be bribed into performing "unnecessary" double mastectomies.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A significantly longer chapter this time! Thank the source text, and scroll down to the end notes for approximate costs adjusted for inflation.
> 
> Warning for a passing reference to suicide.

It was a matter of chance that in the end I should have chosen to move here, to rent this house in particular. I'd eventually landed in the east because it was sparkling and unfamiliar, and nearly as far as I could get from any living member of my family. That I picked this place, here _..._ well.

The practical thing would have been to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of sprawling grass and friendly trees, and I had some money to spare despite my recent expenses, and so I located a weather beaten clapboard bungalow at eighty a month and rented it sight unseen. By the time I arrived, the ink on the lease had been dry nearly a month. I had a cat, an old Dodge, and a Finnish woman who came once a week to clean (and muttered what I suspected were insults while she did).

The house sat on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere: the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals, but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular _except_ shape and size.

I lived on West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge estates that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. Across the courtesy bay, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water.

Amidst it all, and in the consoling proximity of millionaires, my house was an eye-sore. As it was a small eye-sore it had been overlooked, and so I had a view of the water and a partial view of my neighbor's lawn for only eighty dollars a month.

The estate on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was an imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.

This, as it turned out, was Jay Gatsby's mansion, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I glanced out my window and my eyes caught upon his lone, familiar figure.

There was fog over the harbor. Gatsby was standing on his lawn and gazing out across the water as though he had any hope of seeing through it. He stood there for several long minutes, tethered to something. Immobile.

I knew him immediately. I'd never forget that profile; the way he stood. Even from a distance, in the semi-dark of his lawn backlit only from the thin light spilling out from the second floor of his mansion, I knew him.

If I had dared go closer or shine a torch out into the yard, I would have seen the same golden hair and aquiline nose I remembered from several years before. Whatever else he was, his features had always been a walking advertisement for the kind of life he intended to live.

I twitched my curtains closed before he could feel the weight of my gaze, and went to bed.

Jordan Baker—here to make sure I hadn't stuck my head in the oven—stepped from her car in a fluttering white dress and stood still for a moment, shading her grey eyes with one hand as she assessed Gatsby's mansion, as if seeing it in a new light. At length she turned and marched up to my house, shoulders thrown back like a cadet.

She had moved to New York several months ago, and it would be a lie for me to say that I hadn't taken her location into account when deciding on where I'd like to spend my life. Knowing she was here gave me a harmless connection to home, as she was the only person I had voluntarily told about myself. I'd been grateful for her steadying presence via post in the years we'd been separated.

Once she was settled in my living room, my cat perched in her lap and leaving orange hairs on her dress, we spent the better part of the evening discussing my situation. It turned out that while she'd attended parties at the Gatsby mansion in her time since moving here, she had never actually met the man, and so hadn't connected him with the officer I once knew.

She spent the majority of our conversation with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing the truth on it and thought it quite likely to fall.

Meanwhile _I_ spent a not-insignificant portion of our conversation breathing into a paper bag while she attempted to reassure me.

She was not a woman made for offering reassurances, but together we made do.

When she left me late that evening, feeling somewhat steadier and less as though the world I'd built for myself was collapsing out from underneath me, I walked her out to her car and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of my cat wavered behind the curtains as she walked across the windowsill in my kitchen and as I turned my head to watch her I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away Gatsby had again emerged from the shadow of his mansion. He was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars.

I couldn't have moved if the grass roller I sat on had suddenly threatened to flatten me. I was motionless, watching as he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and women came and went like moths among the whisperings, the champagne, and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d'oeuvre, spiced meats crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastries bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived—no thin five piece affair but a whole pit full of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs' the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath—already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then (excited with triumph) glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these bewitching ladies in trembling opal seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the "Follies". The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night that I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were met with by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes (as was the case with Jordan) they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

I had been actually _invited_. The invitation came hand-delivered from a chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg blue who walked briskly across the freshly cut grass (Gatsby's, not mine) one Saturday morning and offered it to me with an eyebrow slightly raised in judgment. Whether his silent opinion was regarding the oddity of anyone actually receiving an invitation to a Gatsby party or if it was due to the fact that I was still in my dressing gown coming up on eleven o'clock in the morning, I couldn't be sure. I suspect it might have been some mixture of the two.

The note was surprisingly formal in tone. The honor would be entirely Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his "little party" that night. He had seen me several times and had intended to call on me long before but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it. It was signed Jay Gatsby in a majestic hand.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know. I hadn't had enough time to prepare myself properly for meeting him again. Though in truth, there would never have been enough time. I moved to West Egg to escape my past, and here it seemed as though I'd never left it. Perhaps I'd dragged it along with me, or vice versa. My life as an unlucky penny in Gatsby's well-heeled shoe.

I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were all selling something: bonds or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.

I made no effort to find my host when I arrived, avoiding conversation and nodding briefly to those whose faces I recognized from the commuter train as I slunk in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

Well on my way to getting roaring drunk from sheer anxiety, I at last saw Jordan Baker—who had promised to meet me upon my frantic phone call earlier that day—exit the house and stand at the head of the marble steps. She leaned a little backward, one hand on the railing, as she looked with contemptuous interest down into the garden. Her eyes caught on me and her face brightened in welcome.

"Hello!" I hollered, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden, and my legs were unsteady as I hopped up the stairs.

"I thought you might be here," she responded, playing up our 'coincidental' meeting. With her arm resting on mine, I again descended the steps (somewhat more cautiously) and we sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.

The girl beside Jordan leaned closer and said, "Sorry you didn't win."

That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before.

"You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we met you here about a month ago."

"You've dyed your hair since then," Jordan remarked. The girl reached up and touched her blonde bob with a smile and a nod, obviously pleased to have been remembered. "Do you come to these parties often?" Jordan asked her.

"The last one was the one I met you at," she answered in a confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, Lucille?"

It was for Lucille too.

"I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Croirier's with a new evening gown in it."

"Did you keep it?" asked Jordan.

"Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It's gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars."

"There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that," said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with _any_ body."

"Who doesn't?" I inquired.

"Gatsby. Somebody told me—" The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially, Jordan throwing me an amused look. "Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once."

A thrill passed over the table. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.

"I don't think it's so much _that_ ," argued Lucille skeptically. I was about to silently applaud her discernment when she added, "it's more that he was a German spy during the war."

One of the men nodded in confirmation. "I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany," he assured us positively.

"Oh no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in the American army during the war." As their credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometime when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man."

She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned around to look for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

I was baffled.

The first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was now being served and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety. Their disgust was so obvious that one had to wonder why they'd deigned to come at all. My guess was that Jordan had dragged them.

After wasteful and thoroughly inappropriate half hour, Jordan leaned in and whispered, "Let's get out. This is much too polite for me."

We got up and she explained that we were going to find the host—I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate escort nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.

Jordan caught my hand, laughter at last bursting up out of her as she pulled me along up the staircase towards the mansion proper. "I'm so sorry, Nick. I should have warned you about the rumors! Gosh, the things people say about him. You wouldn't have believed it, though, truly, not having heard it for yourself."

She was probably right.

We leaned together against a railing, speaking quietly of nothing for a few minutes as we observed the spectacle below. Finally I decided that it was time I made a real effort to locate and speak to Gatsby. I couldn't very well spend an evening of anxiety for nothing, especially not having been invited. The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there. Jordan couldn't find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the veranda. On a chance we tried a very important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, paneled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas. It was otherwise empty, an unsettling hush in the midst of the partygoers.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other torturously, fashionably and keeping in the corners—and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps.

By midnight the hilarity had increased, and we still hadn't found him. We split up, myself releasing Jordan from my mood to pursue a dance with one of the girls in the middle of the dance floor. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto was singing in jazz and in between the numbers people did "stunts" all over the garden while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls, and the moon had risen higher. Floating on the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the orchestra on the lawn.

Two finger bowls of champagne later and as the scene changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound, I finally caught sight of his approach at the edge of my vision. Before turning to look at him fully I spotted Jordan watching us from the opposite side of the room; her expression of concern warmed me, but I did not wave her over.

He stood in silence beside me for a long moment, and my stress from earlier in the evening having melted away by the booze I was more than content to wait for him to speak. At a lull in the entertainment, he looked over at me and said—

I no longer remember his opening line, only that my response tugged a genuine smile out of him where before he'd been watching the crowd with something of a critical disregard. I expected that, most often, those who tried to pull him out of his mood received only a pained, pasted-on rictus grin.

Badly-hidden discontent had spent any number of parties shading his face, and although rumors abounded as to the why of it, I could not imagine what it was that had altered him so from the man I once knew.

Nevertheless, the smile he graced me with was the very one I remembered. It was a rare sort of smile, the kind with a quality of eternal reassurance to it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on _you_ with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

"Nick Carraway," I said politely, determined not to act like I was feeling: exceptionally wrong-footed.

"Carraway." There came a brief pause as his eyes raked over my face, inspecting my jawline and cheekbones with a critical air. Comparing. This was the first time since my moving here that he'd been close enough to really see my features. I felt more naked than ever before in my life, a part of me convinced that he would notice something amiss through my flannel suit. Naturally, he only asked, "Any relation to Daisy Fay? I heard mention of that name from her a time or two."

"My cousin." _Long gone,_ I didn't add. The lie—practiced in my bathroom mirror until my face stopped betraying me as I spoke—burned its way up my throat. Daisy was my cousin. Daisy was dead. These were the facts as they had been rewritten; this was the story my family had consented to tell.

The sting of it lingered behind my nose, unpleasant as alcohol caught in my sinuses.

Something subtle changed then, his smile becoming softer. Seeing it hurt almost as much as the lie. "It's a pleasure to meet you," he said.

"You as well—" I allowed my voice to break off into a nearly awkward silence and he adopted an air of mild surprise, feigned perhaps, at the idea of having to introduce himself at a party he was hosting.

"Forgive me, old sport. I'm Jay Gatsby."

The conversation faded, and in the few minutes before he left to attend to people other than myself, I experienced the strange sensation of knowing that we were a pair of intimate strangers in a manner of which only I was cognizant. It was as though the two of us became, briefly, the eye of a storm, surrounded by his brightly plumaged and highly intoxicated guests. Between us were only my secrets.

Daisy's story had ended quietly.

After the failed attempt at a wedding, I was forced into a corner by my family and told quite sternly by my mother that I had to make a choice. Grovel, beg, and marry Tom if he would still deign to have me, or accept a much less enticing match to a family friend twice my age with three nearly grown children from a previous marriage. (My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in that city for three generations. An unwed daughter was unacceptable.)

To a person, none of them expected that I would find a way to compel a third option. But the pearls Tom had given me the day before our wedding provided me with an opportunity, and the letter which had arrived for me that afternoon forced my hand. 

I proceeded to threaten and bribe my way into being; it worked only because nothing motivated them like fear of ruin.

I sold the strand of pearls to finance everything necessary to keep my secret from becoming a public scandal. In return for allowing them to retain their dignity and social standing, they allowed themselves to be artificially strong-armed into maintaining the lie.

Doctors treated people like me with uncommon scrutiny and suspicion, if not outright disdain. But there _were_ people like me, many people, and we took good care of one another whenever we could. A whisper here and a murmur there, somebody who knows somebody who knows a sympathetic doctor, or a doctor who could be bribed into faking it. It was not a perfect system, and in fact it left me feeling demeaned and degraded on more than one occasion, but it did get me what I needed: a body that would no longer betray me.

Daisy Fay officially died on the operating table on the twenty-seventh of October, 1919; the result of a particularly rapid and malicious form of cancer. There had been no hope of recovery, and her death certificate was as real as any money could buy.

A small announcement was published in the church newsletter, and a short obituary was posted in the local paper. No photo. "She is survived by her parents, Andrew Fay and his wife Jean (née Carraway), and four brothers, Marcus, Lloyd, Randolph, and Frederick."

It was generally acknowledged that Tom Buchanan had dodged a bullet. He settled down not long after with a Helen D— of Atlanta; an altogether agreeable woman. I'm sure she's better for Tom that I ever would have been.

Simultaneously with my death, documents were procured for Nicholas Carraway, born three months earlier than Daisy to the daughter of my father's uncle's youngest girl, who had spent the last two decades living abroad in Greece and was therefore unable to either object to or refute my existence.

I took my mother's maiden name as my own, overruling the family's objections with the simple reminder that anyone who had known my family would certainly recognize them in my face. (It had been brought to my attention that I resembled the rather hard-boiled painting of a great-uncle that hung in my father's office.) They couldn't risk anyone digging for a scoop about an illegitimate child. I had to be real.

After it was all over, my aim was to move across the country and never contact any of my family again. From their end, if I could manage to die in obscurity, as well, that would be preferred. Instead of being the warm center of the world, my home now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe. I was unwelcome.

And so it came to pass that Daisy was my cousin, and Daisy was dead.

These were the facts as they had been rewritten.

As I walked the few steps home again from the party that night, a heavy fear I'd been carrying with me fell from my shoulders all at once. The dam had not broken. The worst had not occurred. In meeting my eyes as he had, he'd casually conferred on me the freedom of being known for that which I was, without suspicion. The man who once knew me better than all others had not recognized me now.

I had passed a test I never thought I'd take. And so with the moonlight over the water and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In 2021, Nick's rent would be $1,250 a month. The mansions on either side go for between $190,000 and $235,000 a season. The dress Gatsby purchased for the partygoer would be $4,000 today. The pearl necklace from Tom Buchanan is stated to have been valued at $350,000 which would be a whopping 5.5 _million_ now, and is certainly more than enough to have financed a medical transition.


End file.
